Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/436

 430 Southern Historical Society Papers.

was in a blaze of fury because of it. The effect of it upon their com- merce and shipping interest was most disastrous, and they believed that ruin impended over them. The Old South was equally excited, though it had no carrying trade and was in no wise affected by the Act. But an agricultural people, living much by themselves, develop large individuality, and are always liberty- loving. Hence, though in many respects the gainers by intercourse with England, the sons of the Old South stoutly resisted all encroachments upon their free- dom by the Mother Country a term of endearment they still loved to use. The Old South denounced the Navigation Act, which did not hurt its interests at all, just as severely as it did the Stamp and Revenue Acts. All were blows at the inalienable rights of freemen, and all were alike opposed. Christopher Gadsden, of South Caro- lina, in a speech delivered in Charleston in 1766, advocated the inde- pendence of the Colonies, and he was the first American to proclaim that thought. The first American Congress met in Philadelphia on the 7th of October, 1774. Peyton Randolph, of Virginia, was elected President of that body. On the 2oth of May, 1775, the Scotch-Irish of Mecklenburg county, North Carolina, absolved all allegiance with the Crown of Great Britian, and set up a government of its own. On the 1 2th of April, 1776, the Provincial Congress of North Caro- lina took the lead of all the States in passing resolutions of independ- ence. On the 7th of June of that year, Richard Henry Lee, of Vir- ginia, moved: " These united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." It was upon this motion in the Conti- nental Congress that the separation from Great Britain took place. It was a Virginian who wrote the Declaration of Independence. It was a Virginian who led the rebel armies to victory and to freedom. It was a Southerner Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina whose draft of the Constitution was mainly adopted.

Thus, independence was declared upon the motion of one South- erner; its principles were set forth in the Declaration written by another Southerner. A third led the armies of the rebel colonies to victory, while a fourth framed the Constitution, which, though denounced at one time by the South-haters as " a covenant with death and a league with hell." has lived for a hundred years, and is likely to live for many hundreds more.

You of this newly discovered region need not be ashamed of your ancestors and blush that they lived in the Old Bourbon South. That Bourbon regime lasted for eighty years, the grandest and noblest of American history. Eleven of its seventeen Presidents were of South-